Motherboard Guide

BIOS Settings & Test Setup

BIOS Settings

It's the familiar ASUS BIOS that we have already seen on the Maximus III Formula. One of the main differences we noticed about ASUS' P55 motherboards so far is that the CPU Ratio setting available ranges from 9x to 24x, when other brands (and the reference chipset) go up to 22x for our Core i7-870 processor. The other settings are as follows:

Base Clock: 80 - 500MHz

CPU Ratio: 9 - 24x

Memory Ratio: Auto, 800, 1066, 1333, 1600

CPU Voltage: 0.85 - 1.7V (in 0.00625V steps)

Memory Voltage: 1.2 - 2.5V (in 0.0125V steps)

IMC Voltage: 1.1 - 1.7V (in 0.00625V steps)

PCH Voltage: 1.05 - 1.15V (in 0.10V steps)

When it came to overclocking, the SABERTOOTH 55i was on par with the top P55 motherboards we tested recently, reaching a maximum of 210MHz after pushing up the relevant voltages. Unlike ASUS' Maximus III Formula, there are no excessive onboard features that are geared for overclocking but the SABERTOOTH does decently here without any of that.

Test Setup

With our recent mainstream P55 motherboard shootout, we went with Windows 7 as the operating system. Similarly, this OS was used for the SABERTOOTH 55i testing. Naturally, we used our previous results for comparison. The configuration used:

The following benchmarks were used to determine the performance of the P55 motherboards. Note that we ran into issues while using the Vantage edition of benchmarks and thus we're using older equivalents here for the time being until we've sorted the issue with Futuremark: